Stream to YouTube and Twitch at the same time, at each platform's best quality

Most multistream tools make you send every platform the same quality, which means your best platform gets your worst stream. Here's how to stop doing that.

If you go live on YouTube and Twitch at the same time, you've probably made a compromise that never sat right: you pick one set of settings and use it for both.

The trouble is those two platforms aren't equal. Twitch caps out a lot lower than YouTube. So when you pick one setting for both, you're really picking Twitch's ceiling, and YouTube ends up with a stream that's worse than it could have been.

Let's fix that.

Why your multistream tool makes you choose

Most multistream services run in the cloud. You upload one stream, and they re-encode it into one output per platform on their servers.

Doing that at scale costs them real money, so they keep your input modest and send close to the same quality everywhere. Your actual ceiling becomes whatever the cheapest output supports.

That's why you set 6000 kbps for Twitch and YouTube quietly gets 6000 too, even though it would take far more.

Give every platform its own encoder

The fix is the way broadcast has always done it: a separate encoder for each destination, each one set up for the platform it's feeding.

YouTube gets 1440p60 at a high bitrate
Twitch gets 1080p60 at the bitrate it accepts
LinkedIn or X get 1080p30

They all run at once on your machine, and nothing is shared between them. No single platform drags the rest down to its level.

The catch: your upload

There's an important concept to understand here. When every destination gets its own full stream straight from your machine, your upload has to carry all of them at the same time. That's roughly the combined bitrate of everything you're sending.

Cloud services hide this by having you upload once and splitting it on their end. The price you pay for that convenience is the quality cap and the monthly bill.

So check that your upstream can cover the total. For two or three destinations on a decent connection, it usually can, and you stop handing YouTube a stream that got squeezed down to fit Twitch.

That's the whole idea behind Polycast: give each platform its best, not its worst. Join the waitlist → and I'll let you know when it's ready.